For Love Of Big Brother
by LawlietLennoxLove
Summary: In a gilded room with not nearly enough corners to display all the rich, opulent spoils it holds, yet also manages to contain the greatest spoil of them all, England lights three candles, three lone, white swords of Damocles firmly rooted in an ornate candlestand and his firmer yet vouchsafe, and England leans over and wishes Alfred goodnight.


A/N: Title is derived from the Eurythmics song 'For Love Of Big Brother', from their album '1984' which was released in 1984 and is all based on 1984 because they are JUST THAT AWESOME. A gasp of horror and an instant redirection to the amazing Orwell for those who haven't yet acquainted themselves with the wonders of a totalitarian state where it's damned if you do and damned if you don't. Utopia of utopias.

In the hopes of doing justice to England and America the characters (because the real England is just bleh), and to the wonderful 1984. And it really doesn't.

_Enjoy._

For Love Of Big Brother

At first glance the room is magnificent, heaps upon heaps of finery whose splendour banished any ideas of the mundane far, far away. The room spoke of culture and success interwoven as finely as the thick, intricate carpetwork, imported from across roiling, multitudinous oceans, liberally spread across the floor to lie in its pattern of hours and hours of painstaking workmanship, so that its texture, imbued and heavy with incense and sweat, lay under but two pairs of feet. The room singularly spoke of an Empire of wealth, spoke in a voice rich as the deep purple of the dye, and spoke in a voice that was British.

The second glance shows an Aladdin's Cave, the lustrous golden possessions of rajahs, emperors and sultans in every corner, and everywhere, jewel-facets reflecting the light of the fire, twisting and dwindling behind the grate, and three lone candles, white wax in silver candle-stands. A cache of all the treasures of the world, truly, with the treasure predominant yet taste lingering behind with only a dissonant juxtaposition of oppression and hauteur to be left on the palate, with none of the distinct, elegant panache of a truly refined finish. A jealous hoard, almost indiscriminate in its compilation, prizes of the prized, a thousand conquests and glories at one exhibit in one glance.

The true laurels, however, lie beneath the brocade-edged velvet canopy of the four-poster bed, where coils of golden ivy drape, entwining around dark mahogany posts like convolutions of thin, sylphlike snakes. Instead of a wreathed circle of delicate, viridescent leaves, however, was a crown, again of gold. Strange, perhaps, that it might be _the _trophy, philistine and uncultured as it seemed beside anything else, even the pillow it was set against: smooth silk and meticulous needlework. But then again, it took a certain finesse to appreciate the rough edges of pure diamond.

Fortunately, England was such a connoisseur, one astute enough to recognise the invaluableness of this rarity, though priceless already, for still holding all the promise of bearing yet more fruit of the fertile, freshly-flooded banks of the Egyptian Nile, the bitter mire awash with murky water and sweltering with perspiration, lush with potential. An art as this could hardly be deemed as mere agriculture, where labour sown by the handful was reaped hundredfold. It was the same principle as the fact that the young boy under the rustling satin covers couldn't possibly be passed off as just a boy, not with the features alone that transcended those of the clustered angels that hung, ornately-framed, above his head, not with the laced collar of a pristine nightshirt at the milky paleness of his throat, and especially not with his birthright: the brother of the Empire that single-handedly stakes the best quarter of the world, perhaps, but first and foremost and always _America._

"Goodnight, Alfred," England crooned, and one might have mistaken him to be inebriated with more than mere honey-dew or Paradise-milk, might suppose the flashing of incandescent emeralds to be down to something altogether more sinister, all the boundless intemperance, indeed, of Casanova and an all-annihilating avarice that burnt and razed and branded lands as if they were mere map-paper in emulation of the razing infernos of Hell's very own furnace that had amalgamated the two, a concoction that any fallible being, mortal and immortal alike, was predisposed to so excessively partake in, if only they had the chance. Honey-dew, the drug of the poets, was a poor substitute, and gin, the proletariat's depravity, poorer still: it was not drunken profanities that stumbled, disfigured and half-formed, from a slurring tongue, nor lurid, flamboyant fantasies that weaved and flitted in the thick, heady sweet-smelling opium-smoke from a ludicrous one whose sense had already taken off with the imagination, but the smooth, slick enticement of a silken cord, oiled and pendant in slippery, mercury moonlight. Or the razorblade of a guillotine by no means lacking in use.

Whatever it was, any fool – any fool but the one gazing into them, gazing headlong into the fire-and-brimstone abyss with wide cerulean eyes and the curve of a smile on small petal-soft lips – could surmise that it was anything but benign. England smiles, too, the charming and easy smile of a courtesan who slips off the tainted satin covers whilst shielded by all the spirits and murdering ministers and dunnest smokes of Hell, and laced the blood, corrupted and viscous like sealing-wax, with cleansing poison, and made away with the money in the dead of night.

"Can you not spare a simple 'goodnight' for your big brother, Alfred?" he murmurs, leaning down to kiss a soft, faintly flushed cheek, cherubic still with plump innocence, lingering perhaps a moment too long. The fragrance of the violet flowers of the native opopanax, the faint scent of persimmons, sweet and expensive, splashes of red on a silver platter. England inhales, thinks of cravings of fat cigars ringed with gold bands and filled with greasy brown tobacco, a century by.

Alfred only maintains his clear smile, and asks, in the pure voice of a silver teaspoon ringing against fine porcelain, "Where's Netherlands?"

England doesn't pause, doesn't blink, tilting his head slightly as he takes a seat on the velvet cushion of the claret-lacquered wood of the bedside chair. He runs his hand along the back, the intricate design, the flawless grace, along the ropy tassels of the cushion, twists of supple thread, double the price for every full turn, double his pledge of perpetual commitment and unfaltering dedication and raging, resolute devotion to America, until it lined the edges, rigid and unyielding as the arrogant set of aristocratic shoulders, fiercely tenacious as his vow.

"Why, do you miss him?"

America shakes his head, laying it back onto the pillow, and his eyes flutter shut, long, thin, delicate lashes casting longer shades onto the curve of one chubby cheek, the stray filaments at a brush-tip, stretched out by a long-eclipsed spectre. The other cast into shadow, where the fire burned too low to illuminate it, dips and arcs and valleys yet untouched by the light of the three candles, the hazy silhouette that England eyes, calculating, predatory, a sharp-eyed vulture that waits for its carrion to still before it glides down, great, unsightly leathery wings with their stiff quills outstretched, illusory as the taut sails of a tattered and battle-hardened ghost-ship, tense in anticipation and satisfaction and assurance of its sovereignty, the brief, time-suspended moment just prior to the second consummation of the inert, acquiescent body.

"Goodnight, big brother."

England sits, a faultless marble figurine of Adonis, verdant eyes, vacuous at times and inscrutably guarded at others by men in their blood-coated thousands who would pour into extraterritorial lands at a single command and curdle the foreign stretches into a more familiar sight: that of the proverbial streets running the yet more proverbial crimson. Set impenetrable above cheekbones diaphanous in the lambent sway of the lowlight that flickered despite there being no breeze, the only parting of the air through the barely audible swishing of breath that sank deeper and deeper into the rising and slanting falling of its slumber.

When he is certain that Alfred was for all intents and purposes, but most pertinently his, as lifeless as he could be, he reaches out a hand and touches the underside of his jaw lightly with poised fingertips, delicate manoeuvring cast derisorily simple by day but transformed into a complex, very nearly byzantine rite, and rolls the slack head on the pale, limp neck to face him, and very slowly and very deliberately presses his lips to the newly exposed cheek, with what could have been the reverence of cupping the underside of and sipping at the pellucid red within a silvered, sacrosanct chalice.

Aged, fine wine and sweet red persimmons.

**A/N:** Looking back, it really wasn't worth it. Sigh.

–the 1650/60s Navigation Acts drawn up by the English Parliament effectively kicked the Dutch from trading with 'their' parts of America. Poor ol' Netherlands.


End file.
